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Friday, 5 August 2016

The real Jack Martin

To celebrate the forthcoming release of my western Wild Bill
Williams in digital format - published this November from Piccadilly Publishing and available for
pre-order NOW, I thought I'd post a little something about the man who gave me my pen name.

And so I present the real Jack Martin

Jack Martin. The man whom I looked up to as a kid, he seemed ten
feet tall, and the man whose name I use for my western fiction.

Jack Martin was a coal miner in the South Wales coal fields - indeed it was the dust from this
environment that eventually killed him - pneumoconiosis, black
lung disease,was common among a certain age group in the village I was
raised in. The sound of chesty coughs would accompany the dawn
chorus across the village and sticky mementoes of the coal mines would fill handkerchiefs held in the scarred hands of the old colliers.

The original

Coal mining, given the then primitive conditions was a arduous job, and in those days
there was only basic safety equipment. Lives were often lost in
explosions and one time the level where my grandfather was working flooded and over 20 men
were drowned. That was all before I was born. I learned much of this from my grandmother and Gramp never really talked about it.

I was born in 1965 and Gramps had retired by the time I was
five so I can't really remember him working, though he was never idle and his garden gave us the best tomatoes around . He was a tall man, always
dressed immaculately, even when doing the garden he wore a shirt and
tie, as people of his generation did. He grew incredible tasty vegtables and my first ever paid job was
collecting horse manure from the mountain for his garden. I think he
gave me something like 10p a bucket which was good money in those far
off days when the world was black and white and the sun always shone.

My
Grandmother often referred to him as Father Christmas and although they
would argue as people did in those days, about anything really -
leaving the door open, not wiping your feet and trampling garden over
the mat, their relationship was a strong and loving one. They both
spoiled me rotten and I always got the latest comics and would go on the
annual British Legion day trip to Porthcawl with them. Though often
only me and my nan went. Gramps stayed home and probably went for a
sneaky pint down the legion. He did so like a sneaky pint or two.

Hey, sorry about the ancient history but I feel almost old enough to remember black and white radio.

My nan and grandfather, possibly the 1930's

Gramps
loved the westerns and was always reading a western novel. When there
was a western on TV I would watch it with him and he would tell me
stories of when he was in the wild west (completely invented, of course.
The furthest West he ever went was Tonypandy) and in these stories he
would be teamed up with John Wayne or Gary Cooper but never Clint
Eastwood - he never really liked him and would refer to him as an
unshaven hooligan. As a young boy I believed every word of these wild
stories:

That he had been a one legged fighter pilot in the war, thathe had been there when Custer arm-wrestled Wyatt Earp for the price of a drink, that he had smoked the peace pipe with both Geronimo and Sitting Bull.

Jack Martin MK 2

Gramps was a natural storyteller.

Jack Martin - it was his
love of westerns that was passed onto me and apart from the fact that
Eastwood is my all time fave, our tastes are very much the same - John
Wayne is still the ultimate man's man, and the cowboy creed is a design
for life.

When I
published my first western novel, Tarnished Star with Robert Hale LTD (now available as LawMaster) I
was proud that it contained the byline - by Jack Martin. When trying to
decide on a pen name to keep my western fiction separate from my other
stuff it was only natural to use Gramp's name.

He's been gone now
for longer than I care to remember, and I still miss him but I guess he's still
here, inside me - his ideals, his ways, his humour and every one of my westerns that has seen print is as much his work as mine.
For without him I would never have developed my interest and love for
the American West.

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GARY DOBBS/JACK MARTIN

Actor and novelist. As an actor I have appeared in Doctor Who, Torchwood, Gavin and Stacey, Moonmonkeys, Larkrise to Candleford, The Reverend, The Risen.
As a writer I write westerns for the Black Horse Western imprint using the name Jack Martin. Under my own name I am responsible for several novels including the popular Granny Smith series. And using the name Vincent Stark I have written some pretty disturbing stuff.

It's Miss Marple on steroids!

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There was nary a frown when Wild Bill Williams was in town. He had a way about his manner that enabled most folks to forget all their troubles and become positively festive. It was said that Bill could start off a dance at a funeral and carve a grin out of the most granite of faces.

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